Book Quotes - Page 662

The children's book world has given me wonderful friendships and an unbelievably rich life.

I'm sure my first nine years have had a powerful influence on the kind of books I write.

I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.

The gift of creative reading, like all natural gifts, must be nourished or it will atrophy. And you nourish it, in much the same way you nourish the gift of writing - you read, think, talk, look, listen, hate, fear, love, weep - and bring all of your life like a sieve to what you read. That which is not worthy of your gift will quickly pass through, but the gold remains.

He [an earnest young reporter] seemed to share the view of many intelligent, well-educated, well-meaning people that, while adult literature may aim to be art, the object of children's books is to whip the little rascals into shape.

If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.

It's such a thrill when an adult comes up to me and says, 'I read your book as a child and really loved it.' That's a tremendous compliment.

Once a book is published, it no longer belongs to me. My creative task is done. The work now belongs to the creative mind of my readers. I had my turn to make of it what I would, now it is their turn.

I think if a book has the power to move a reader, it also has the power to offend a reader. And you want your books to have power, so you just have to take what comes with that.

Read for fun, read for information, read in order to understand yourself and other people with quite different ideas. Learn about the world beyond your door. Learn to be compassionate and grow in wisdom. Books can help us in all these ways.

You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.

The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life. And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people. But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before.

I closed my eyes, put my right hand on top of the book, and passed it lightly across the cover. It was cool and smooth like a stone from the bottom of the brook, and it stilled me. A whole other world is inside there, I thought to myself, and that's where I want to be.

An eight-mile drive over rain-washed Irish roads in the quick-falling dusk of autumn is an experience trying to the patience, even to the temper, of the average Saxon.

A night journey is essentially a thing of possibilities.

Majestic and stately as Conrad Richter''s Awakening Land Trilogy, Evangeline is a big book from a big mind.

... if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season.

... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?

I loved comic books. I loved Miss Marvel. I talk about Harley Quinn all the time because I think playing villains is so much more fun than playing the good guy because who wouldn't want to go to work and just be crazy?

I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed.

For years and years I carried these notebooks around with me - I had hundreds of pages of notes, these fragments that consisted of biographical anecdotes, diary passages, critical rants, agitations, scenes of my marriage.

I am curious to see what books will emerge from all this writing online that's the result of those who grew up pouring their feelings out on Livejournal or Tumblr - excessive, sometimes automatic, sometimes enraged, emotional, while also quite intellectual - or if formal books will emerge at all, if that's not the point of these unmediated raw spaces. I'm excited by the possibility.

I love reading books, I love the way they feel and getting through it. It's like an event!

I don't get how people want to read books on computers because it must be really bad for your eyes, for starters. I love the smell of books and I just like the whole experience of it. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I like that whole experience - it's the same as I like putting on a record or a CD and waiting for it to arrive or buying it and waiting to listen to it in full.

Life's so brief,” she goes on. “We're, at every juncture, staring mortality in the face. It's the very least we can do if we think it will be of any interest or value, to share the past. And although mine's been crooked, it's also been splendid. It's taught me to be vulnerable and humble, to write this book.